Members of the Senate warned President Biden that his policy of coordinating with social media companies to flag “misinformation” violates Americans’ First Amendment rights.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently said that users “shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others” if they post “misinformation online.” She also revealed that the Biden administration is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”
Last week, President Biden alleged that Facebook is “killing people” by allowing a particular subset of users to spread their views about COVID-19.
“These twelve people are out there giving misinformation. Anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it. It’s killing people. It’s bad information,” Biden said. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally, that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people, that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine.”
In response, a letter sent to the Commander-in-Chief on Monday by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) — joined by Mike Lee (R-UT), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Braun (R-IN), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Rick Scott (R-FL), James Lankford (R-OK), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) — cited Psaki’s statements and expressed concern that the Biden administration’s policy toward “misinformation” is unavoidably partisan.
The letter reads:
The public is already aware of efforts by the media and the executive branch to silence information that is unflattering to this Administration under the guise of “disinformation.” For example, unnamed intelligence officials, the media, and social media platforms engaged in a coordinated effort to censor stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop and his questionable financial dealings under the false label of “disinformation”…
With this history, big tech, the corporate media, and the Administration have no credibility in determining what is and isn’t “misinformation.” Americans are rightfully alarmed and suspicious of the motivations behind the Administration’s apparent coordination with tech companies to potentially censor disfavored speech, as vaguely described by Ms. Psaki at the recent White House press briefing.
Demanding that the administration “halt any actions it has or is currently undertaking to censor Americans’ speech,” the lawmakers asked President Biden to provide the legal justification for flagging misinformation; a specific description of how the administration is working with social media companies; and definitions of terms like “trusted content,” “accurate information,” and “narrative.”